Editing Warhammer 60K: Age of Dusk (Continued) (section)

==Section 51: The Last Loyal Son, and The Queen of Smog==


<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">[Compiler’s Note (Volsanius Greal): It breaks my heart to find these notes. I don’t want it to be true, but I cannot doubt Vasiri’s visions, not now. I was a scribe for many years, and I knew him longer than any other person I’d ever met. Yet, he was so shut off, secluded. Who could truly know his mind? I swear that I had no idea that these events had transpired. Smog was a standard cleanse mission, according to almost every account in the histories collected in these archives. But this one account... it changes everything I thought I knew. Forgive me. If I had known... perhaps I could have saved them... or at least warned them...]
[Secondary note: The term ‘Pentus’ and ‘Pentum’ are generally interchangeable, as both forms of address are found in the histories of the Five Brothers’ Imperium.]<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

Loyalty is a complex notion in a world of changing authorities and powers. From a historian’s vantage point, treachery and loyalty look different, for we look from above, and we see an overview of the dynasties and shifting fortunes of factions. We can tell whether the allegiance of a loyal soldier was deserved by his master, through their actions and the ultimate result of them. But those who lived the histories I and Vasiri relate to you, they have no omniscient view. Even those beings who appear omniscient are not infallible, and nor are their visions of the world complete. In the end, whether Primarch, post human or lowly serf, we are all, ultimately, stumbling forwards through the dark. I feel this should be remembered when I relate to you the tumultuous latter years of the Imperium Pentus’ crusade against the Travesty.

The war had been raging for long years, measured in billions of lives spent in folly and death. After Corbellus, the five brothers waged individual wars using their own fleet elements. Vulkan had established a rotational strategy. Logistically, having all fleets engaged at all times was a drain upon resources. Thus, while four Primarchs engaged the Travesty, one was always recycled back to Pentum, to replenish their supplies, repair their fleets, and recruit new volunteers for the war effort. This way, his fleets could return, fresh and well-stocked for another campaign. At this stage of the war, the Khan returned to Pentum, leaving the four remaining brothers to organise the various fleets of their crusade. Through these coordinated efforts, they divided and drew out the frenzied armies and armadas the Empire of Travesties sardonically referred to as ‘its people’. These armies were not united, for unity was anathema to most of the corrupt, chaos-worshipping warbands and reaver fleets plaguing the Western Chaos Imperium. The main advantage of the Ruinous Forces was the growing, spreading warp storms and reality quakes that filled the region like fissures in crazed glass. Warp travel was torturously slow, with only Primarch-led Pentum fleets being guaranteed a path through the tumult. The Tersis, the dread former Black Ship, turned herald of anarchy, toured the Travesty at the head of an impossible pilgrimage of ships granted sentience and partial ascension by the N[dontmakemesayitanymorepleasepleasepleasepleasepleasebeggingyou]estroying themselves before death took them. Like a plague carrier, the Mistress and Master of the Tersis conjured madness in their wake, and the warp spilled out into reality, coating everything in ichors and drooling impossibilities. And where the Deep Warp pooled, Draziin-maton could come into existence, crawling from the spaces between atoms, and the dark places where nothing should be. Nevertheless, Vulkan and his allies were winning the war in the materium, if not the immaterium.

Lorgar, euphoric and swollen with unnatural power, summoned Perturabo to Cadia. The mechanical prince came reluctantly, and was anointed Warmaster by the Aurellian within the Grand Womb-Cathedral that grew like a tumour from the Cadian surface, up into the upper atmosphere. Lorgar, at this point was less a creature, and more a force of unnatural power. The roots of his essence burrowing into the mantle of Cadia, and formed grotesque, living architecture; Cadia, long abused and defiled, was becoming one with the living warp rift that Perturabo had once begrudgingly called brother. Once such a weakling preacher, he was now a conduit for the fundamental powers of the endless pantheons scratching at the boundaries between worlds. The central throne room of the Cathedral would be impossible to describe to a mortal with a mind made of meat. We only have second hand legends and stories of the Daemon-Imperator’s court. Stories of a throne of barbed spines, a mile tall, festooned with eight million, eight hundred and eighty eight thousand, eight hundred and eighty eight mewling human corpses, all bonded with Lorgar by looping tendrils of sentient blood. Draziin-maton clustered like gargoyles around him, suckling on his nourishing, nauseating waves of corruption. Only Word Bearers possessed by daemons could maintain their forms in that deranged cavern. Perturabo accepted his new title, but Lorgar granted him this boon on the condition he crush the five brothers, and bring the Death Guard into the war.

Early on, when the Draziin-maton were conquering the daemon-primarchs, Mortarion evaded their control through rotting away before them. While the others were shackled to Lorgar’s patrons, Mortarion was free, and when the Travesty and Pentum made war, his Plague Marines, unified under common purpose, did as they pleased. They brought pestilence and famine, taking what they wanted from either side.

Upon leaving the molten, shifting palaces of Cadia-Lorgar, Perturabo sought out Fulgrim on his pleasure world. The soporific world of indolence and vice was coated in countless creatures engaged in relentless fetid copulations, rutting and moaning in ecstasy, even as they drowned on the shores of oceans of perfumed oils. Like some delirious opium fiend, Fulgrim lounged within the solid gold spire dominating the planet, where the scant few surviving Emperor’s children maimed and killed themselves for his flickering amusement.

Perturabo was unopposed as he led his daemon-bound Thallax legions, known to history as the Kai Bane Host, into the Spire of Indolence. Valchocht the Maker was a god of dark intellect and relentless drive to create and build, and Fulgrim’s excess and corrosive idleness was an affront to the god Perturabo served, and he picked his way through the morass of degenerates with distain. Fulgrim had squandered his military forces, and now wallowed in his own folly. He smiled a reptilian smile when his Ironclad brother shattered his doors, and almost dismissively crushed the great hydra-daemon Fulgrim had bred to be his guard dog beneath Forge Breaker.

Perturabo announced his new title and powers, and summoned Fulgrim to rejoin the fight against Pentum. Fulgrim, who had shed his serpentine form and taken on a deceptively mundane humanoid visage, gleaming gold and naked in the pink-mist of the palace, chuckled at Perturabo’s presumption. The Phoenician had been fighting, he claimed, showing Perturabo the terrible wounds inflicted by Russ and his hounds. They had duelled amidst the airless asteroid rubble that had once been a world, the Wolf and Phoenician fighting as the world Russ’ fleet had cracked leaked mantle in exotic streams. Fulgrim had barely escaped, or so he said.

“Had I not earned a moment to lick my wounds? Or have my wounds licked?” Fulgrim asked salaciously, whispering of all the beautiful, garish, carnal machines the two of them could create together. Perturabo sneeringly ignored Fulgrim’s depraved words, and demanded his brother come with him. Fulgrim eventually agreed. He was running out of playthings anyway, he’d need to recruit more.

Once aboard the great daemon engine, Fulgirm was set upon by Perturabo, his Iron Warriors and his Kai Bane monstrosities. Bound in runic chains forged in the pits of Malice, Fulgrim was eventually subdued, though a mound of smashed kai bane and dead Astartes marked his capture. Spitting acidic green ichors, Fulgrim cursed Perturabo for his duplicity, mostly because he betrayed Fulgrim first, before he could betray Perturabo; ever was the twisted logic of the warp-tainted madman.

Fulgrim was a liability to the Scion of the Maker, a wretched fool revelling in his pointless, unproductive campaigns of torture and his carnivals of sin and depravity. He was much more useful to him as a prize, a gift to present to those Perturabo wished to bring into allegiance with the Forces of Travesty.

Soon, the Goliath Engine arrived in orbit over the world of Smog. If it had a previous name, I can find no record of it, and all who knew of the diseased world called it Smog. The reason was self-evident, for even in orbit it was clear the world was shrouded in dense, yellow-green clouds of noisome fog. It clogged the atmosphere and strangled the surface, suffocating everything below. This was the lair of the Queen of Smog, and garrisoned by her champion, Mortarion. Plague Marines flocked to the toxic world, drawn to their master and the Grandfatherly call of the Great Unclean God.

An ossified castle stood amongst the great putrid heaps of dissolved matter, atop a great mountain bier, where the Lords of Decay dwelt. He delivered Fulgrim to Mortarion, alongside a hundred cohorts of Kai Bane, half a chapter of Iron Warriors, and hordes of daemon engines; crustacean defilers, great hound-like maulerfiends and decimators, as well as many new and monstrous daemon engines; strange tracked centaur things, whipping iron krakens and indescribable scuttling, saw-limbed monsters of daemonflesh and perverted technology. Some were no larger than a dreadnought; others would have dwarfed the Imperator titans of old. This was the price Mortarion demanded. In exchange, he would bring his plague fleets to Perturabo’s cause. 

It wasn’t until Perturabo’s great Goliath Engine departed that the chained form of Fulgrim was dragged before the Reaper.

Mortarion, rasping and disturbingly malodorous, strode from the coiling toxic mists like a shade, his rusting scythe larger than Fulgrim was tall. Fulgrim, his powers bound by hostile magicks, was made to kneel by the bloated Plague marines, who jabbed him with their cursed knives. Ordinarily, he would have relished the feeling, but the warp stench of nurgle was about them, and each incision burned, as his slanneshi essence clashed with that of the nurglitch.

“Fulgrim. My brother,” said Mortarion, his voice barely a rasp of a whisper through the oil-drooling mask that grew from his hooded face. Almost tenderly, he placed the tip of his scythe beneath Fulgrim’s chin, and tilted back his head. “Look at us, brother.”

“I am your brother now? So soon are the bonds of fellowship forgotten once dear departed Horus left us?” 

Mortarion did not laugh. He was ever humourless, even amongst the incongruously cheerful daemons of his patron. “You cast off the bonds just as readily, Fulgrim. Or should I name thee... Angel Exterminatus?”

The name made the other creatures haunting the chamber to hiss and spit in loathing. Fulgirm hadn’t noticed the pale, spindly things, not at first. They wept green tar and bore pointed ears, pointed teeth, pointed elbow spurs. Emaciated as plague corpses, the aliens were disgusting parodies of eldar forms. Eldar, albeit twisted half-daemon corruptions, amongst the halls of the Grandfather. Now Fulgrim had seen everything.

“I did not take you for a consorter with xenos, Mort,” Fulgrim laughed spitefully. “Though you’re as moribund and miserable as a craftworlder, I admit. Whose wretches are these then?”

“They are mine.”

The new voice was powerful, echoing from all around. And it was female. The Queen of Smog had hidden herself from the primarch’s daemonic perception, no mean feat when the daemon in question was one of the most powerful there was. But once she spoke, the spell was broken, and his offensively handsome features focused in like a laser upon the speaker.

She was indistinct, like an old photographic negative accidentally laid over another, and her edges rippled with the raw essence of the warp, churning and billowing with smog as she perched upon her throne, so translucent, the skeleton of the towering female was more visible than the pale and putrefying flesh that clad it.

“I know your name too, maiden, daemon princess,” Fulgrim spat. “But you are just a shadow, a shade of a swallowed goddess. Nothing so very powerful.”

Fulgrim fought against his chains, drawing upon the Angel Exterminatus, his own slannesh-born warp essence. But he found his powers draining away, leeched somehow. Fulgrim did not know that Mortarion had learned of how to bind the powers of daemon primarchs the hard way. Mortarion knew Fulgrim’s true name, and ritually invoked it as Fulgrim lay trapped. This ceremony, combined with all the other indignities inflicted upon him, was enough to sap his daemonic powers.

She laughed, though it was a savage, petty laugh of mockery and desolation. “I do not need to be the most powerful... only more powerful than you. This is my world, a wedding gift of my Lord husband, my Great Unclean One.”

“You are not Isha. Perhaps you are an echo of the dead eldar witch, but no more than that; a fragment of some story, animated by nurgle. She, the Prince of Perversion, ate her! I know I can taste her on my forked tongue!”

Fulgrim felt the smog constrict around him, crushing his throat. “Weakling daemon, a lot has changed. The warp shifts, and ever does the Great Game continue. Slannesh’s power wanes. That bitch’s star is no longer in the ascendancy. You have no power over us.”

“Take off these chains, and I shall show you my power!” Fulgrim spat. The shadows of great pinions shimmered at Fulgrim’s back, before they began to wither and crumble to nothing. Rotting, all decay. War and despair were growing in power in the galaxy, as the new gods rose and the Dissolution loomed.

“Anger is not your ally,” Mortarion pointed out wearily to his brother. While the Queen of Smog loathed Fulgrim, Mortarion was grimly resigned to events. He felt neither joy nor sorrow for the other daemon’s fate. “You spurned him millennia ago, and Khorne has not grown any fonder of you brother.”

The Queen of Smog leaned forward, her form shimmering as the Smog passed through her. “Her adherents are almost all extinguished. You have killed more than a few of them. No more to replace them, to give her storming protuberance form and an image. Like a gargoyle eroded by entropy’s touch, her face is being worn away, and with it her power. Even the Eldras Ynneas have been stolen away from her, cocooned in cold and shadow by Mephet’ran, the Jackal, the Morningstar, Venus, Deceiver, Yngir star-hungry and its deceptive plot. My beloved’s champion, he who is named Death, has sent his Destroyer Hive to find my living children and bring them to my side. But Slannesh devoured my other children, and I will reclaim what was stolen from me by She Who Thirsts. Starting, I think, with the souls YOU stole, Angel Exterminatus! And when you are but a husk and I am Mother of Eldar once more...” 

She pointed to a sword, chained to one of the ossified walls. A curved sword, a sword Fulgrim knew well. 

“Impossible,” he whispered as he looked upon the Laer sword, the sword which had led him down the path to ascension and beyond.

“The Deep Warp rises. All is possible in these End Times. The Laer sword returns, and with it, you perish.”

Fulgrim felt fear then, for the first time in as long as he could remember. As the chaos eldar and Plague marines dragged him towards a great cage, he called out to Mortarion to save him. He called upon the memory of their old bonds of brotherhood and kinship. But Mortarion was deaf to his pleas, and watched as Fulgrim was carved, stabbed, peeled, pierced with throbbing tendrils of rotten vines, that drank deep of his daemonic ichors and intruded upon his manifested form. Fulgrim screamed, roaring and bursting with claws and snarled maws as his daemonic form rebelled at the violations. Plague marines were crushed by lashing tentacles, spindly half-eldar lacerated by sprouting pincers and tusked maws. But still the Queen of Smog, a fragment of a murdered pantheon, reborn under nurgle’s besotted influence, drained and tore at the Angel Exterminatus. The serpent within writhed and fought, clinging to Fulgrim with its venomous talons, desperate and all the more monstrous for it; Fulgrim’s form shifted and churned through a million different combinations, going from humanoid to cephalopod to crustacean to things indescribable. 

“Mortarion... please...” he gurgled, from a dozen slavering lips. Mortarion’s hollow eyes were weary, so weary, but he said nothing. He left Fulgrim chained and humbled, watching his own executioner’s blade from across the hall.

The Lord of the Death Guard turned instead to his massing military forces, spread out upon the mountainside. Plague marines of the Death Guard remnants were joined by other renegade nurglitch Astartes, equally corroded and corrupted. Their geneseed was poison, and there would be no more of them once the war was done. But then, all would die by the end of this war. Dusk would set for all. Still it was almost twenty thousand space marines assembled before him, like some dark parody of a Crusade-Era Legionary muster. With them, they brought daemon-infested fellblades and land raiders, predators and speeders, manticores and whirlwinds swollen with blight. And now, he had daemon engines of Valchocht, soulgrinders, defilers, giant machines like armoured drakes and hounds, tracked centaurs built in mockery of men, one-horned engines gilded with iron and gore. Cohorts of daemonic robot things, Perturabo called kai bane. There were phallic, semi-organic artillery pieces, festooned with fangs and tendrils, that loaded cursed shells like octopuses shovelling food into their beaks. Largest of all the daemon engines was a terror that had perhaps once been an Imperator titan, but instead of bipedal leg towers, gigantic hinged spider’s legs protruded, with snapping pincers on each warhound-sized limb. Daemonic flesh grew across its shoulder bastions like septic coral, covered in writhing, fang-tipped trunks and proboscises. It looked like some grotesquely overgrown defiler, with a roaring war horn that shook the world when it brayed. Perturabo had not given it a name, but Mortarion could feel the daemon prince that was infused into every black-blooded vein of the defiler-titan. He tasted the life of the creature, which had once been an Iron Warrior before it had ascended to become something greater, and yet far worse. Its name was Grendel. Another daemon engine looked like no one thing in particular. It was a strange amalgam of tracked vehicles and walkers, tanks and aircraft, valkyries, basilisks and dreadnoughts, festooned with randomly placed turrets and whirring close combat weapons. His Deathshroud bodyguards referred to it simply as ‘the Khimyra’, which was apt enough, as they thing was a fusion of broken parts of other daemons, trickling through the warp, pressed together painfully by the Maker’s fell champion.

This was a force to conquer worlds, to defile space ever further, and his great plague fleet waited at anchor in orbit, waiting to take this force from Smog, to war. Mortarion knew eventually Lorgar would draw him into the war, just as he knew he would perish in it. But he was trapped, his fate was fixed. Despair and bitter resignation was a part of him now. 

Eventually, he returned to the throne room, to watch his brother slowly dying. His shifting form was spent now, and he had taken on his crusade-era form; perhaps hoping to fan some ember of pity Mortarion had for the brother he once knew.

In contrast, the Queen of Smog was growing more solid, more radiant, as she drank of the warp stuff siphoned from the Angel Exterminatus. The warp was growing stronger around Smog, warp predators and Draziin-maton were massing, he could feel them. Perturabo should not have brought Fulgrim here. Did he not see that every warp power in the galaxy was looking for a way to transcend the Dissolution? The daemon queen, whether Isha or not, was no different. It seemed only Mortarion had no desire to survive this war. There were several moments in the history of the universe, moments where Mortarion was vulnerable, where he could be harmed. At this point, another such moment was approaching.

“You are alone now Fulgrim. All your beauty and genius is for nothing,” taunted the daemon queen. “Nurgle has chased Slannesh from Smog, and left you hear at our mercy. No daemon now, and barely a primarch. You have no friends here.”

For some reason Fulgrim, who still sagged in his chains, smiled at her words. The Queen was confused. “Mortarion, why does he smile?”

Mortarion had no answer.

But Fulgrim did. He raised his head.

“I smile because you are right. I have no friends. And yet, I have plenty of enemies,” Fulgrim leaned back, his eyes closed, as if he were listening to something far away. “Enemies that have been searching for me, ever since I called out to them when my Ironclad sibling first caught me.”

Mortarion knew what his Master of the Fleet was going to say before even as he voxed him. Because he suddenly sensed what Fulgrim did. He knew who was coming.

“My lord, I am detecting multiple warp translations at system’s edge, I-”

“The Lion is here,” Mortarion replied with his voice of rasping death. He drew forth his scythe, even as Fulgrim began to cackle like a delirious idiot.

It was a fool who underestimated a primarch, Mortarion realised. So long as an immortal, he’d almost forgotten.

###

The Antioch entered Smog’s system, the White Spear blazing. The lance beam carved through the perimeter fleet, leaving bisected ruins to blaze in the silent void as it sped towards Smog, wreathed in blazing void shields as it weathered all attempts to impede it. At its back, a vast fleet erupted, similarly intent on getting to grips with the enemy.

Only the Lion came, for Vulkan and his fleet could not traverse the psychic null rift left in the wake of the Ophilim Kiasoz, as it unmade its way towards the heart of the Eye. It would be up to the Lion and his forces alone.

Fortunately enough, the Lion possessed one of the largest of Pentum’s fleets at this point in the Age of Dusk. Not only was he in command of half of the White Lancers Commandery and support elements from the Knights Supplicant, Jade Princes, Nemenmarines and the Vanquishers; he had a Ryzan exterminator armada, heavy laden with Titans and the Ninth Thunder Lizard tank regiment. 

While on his rotation away from the war, the Lion had also sent forth a strike cruiser of White Lancers to search for any sign of the Dark Angels, those who had not fallen to madness or become traitors.

As they searched, he came to the planet of Kimmeria, the secretive recruitment world for another Commandery, the Lion’s own Commandery. While the White Lancers were pure and effective warriors, they were in essence a Commandery divided, for the Lion and the Khan shared them in the early years of Pentum, due to the Khan’s injuries making him unable to sire new space marines. Consequently, the White Lancers had a schizophrenic nature, for they were an amalgam of knightly virtue and codes of practice, with the more intuitive culture of personal deeds of the nomadic Jaghati Khan. Jonson wanted a Commandery he could mould to his desires. And by the time he returned to Kimmeria they were ready to be cultivated for the war effort. Though Kimmeria was an advanced civilised world, the Circle Cults of Kimmeria had been active on the planet ever since it was a feral world, as far back as M35. Back then, it had been a recruitment world for Dark Angels post-Caliban (possibly even the homeworld of the mythological figure of Master Azrael, though that might have been a fiction concocted by later historians), and so to was it again. When the Lion came to Kimmeria, they instantly agreed to produce his marines, and welcomed his geneseed scientists like conquering heroes. They even helped build orbital docks across the Kimmerian system, so the Lion could build his new Commandery a fleet and material to wage galactic war. While the other Commanderies warred with the Travesty, he had this new force set to work, fighting alongside the White Lancers, policing and protecting the Imperium Pentum, facing off against the lesser daemons and rebels arising due to the spreading warp storms all across their empire. This secret Commandery learned fast and fought well.

He called this new Commandery the Angelos Primitus, or ‘First Angels’. They wore the black panoply of the First Legion, and took the symbol of the antique numeral ‘I’, surrounded by faint grey wings upon their pauldrons; a bold statement, which proclaimed them as the inheritors of the First Legion, a return to the time when they were the only Legion, and the Great crusade was a simpler, nobler enterprise.

Thus, when the Lion returned to the Travesty war, not only did he bring his White Lancers, he brought a full two Commanderies worth of First Angels.

The Lion’s fleet plunged through the plague fleet’s defences like a hot dagger plunged between ribs, while the escorts and attack ships drew the chaos forces into a time-consuming void war, the landers and transport ships advanced into low orbit. After barely a day of manoeuvring, the Lion’s forces were ready to deploy against the cursed world of Smog. Initial orbital bombardments were implemented by the Nemenmarines, who thought it folly to land without even attempting to annihilate the enemy in orbit, or at least burn off the cloying fog that obscured any attempts to scan the surface. Yet, virus bombs were consumed, volcano shells detonated, but the gaps they blew in the smog closed soon afterwards. Some daemonic force was shrouding the planet. They had encountered similar forces before in the long war against chaos. Ground forces were needed to land, destroy the daemon, and open the world up to orbital scouring.

Their landing zone, some twenty miles from the solitary mountain castle, was cleared by a preceding macrocannon barrage that scattered the cloying smog for long enough for the landers to navigate their descent safety. Only the Thunder Lizards did not require landing ships, for they descended on their retro-thrusters, falling slowly to the ground on columns of white orange fire. The infantry remained with the fleet, for the smog would liquidate even power armoured warriors within a few hours of exposure. Only the heaviest, armoured elements were chosen, terminators, dreadnoughts, tanks and walkers. The Ryzan Titans took one flank, alongside their Freeblade knights and their sturdiest robots. On the other flank, the Thunder Lizards deployed. The Tyrannosaurus Rex, the largest and most formidable of the Tyrannosaur class, landed first before the rest of the different castes of tank landed around it; heavy domed Ankylosaur transports, Allosaurus hunter-killers, Brachiosaur self-propelled macrocannons, and all the other support vehicles required of the legendary armour Regiment. In the centre deployed the Lion and his elite Astartes; the Lancers in gleaming white, the First Angels in ominous black, terminators deployed inside a column of Land Raiders. At his side also deployed Tsulganor of the Salamanders, Vulkan’s envoy to the Lion’s fleet, there to maintain the ‘continuity of purpose’ the Pentum Imperium was supposed to possess. Hundreds of dreadnoughts marched beside the land raiders, led by the Contemptor Nullan, an ancient Iron Hand who had begged the Lion for deployment, desperate for the chance to revenge himself upon the Gorgon’s killer.

Yet, even as they marched towards the Queen’s keep, her dreadful miasma descended upon the army once more. Alert sirens sounded within every vehicle, as the toxic gas already began to work its vile purpose. But the war machines of Pentum were built to survive and endure, and the armoured landing party forged on through the cloying smog, relentless and resolute in the mission the Lion had tasked them with. However, the smog also caused visibility to plummet, until the way across the poisoned soil was obscured only two hundred metres ahead.

The two armies, Mortarion’s and the Lion’s, stalked each other across the featureless grey fields. Though they could not see, their thermal sensors and sonic detectors could roughly pinpoint their counterpart’s locations. Neither side could ever hope to be silent; one side was filled with the roar of throttling engines, the other with the daemonic shrieks of neverborn horrors. The Ankylosaur tanks of the Thunder Lizards opened up their flanks, deploying their legions of diminutive servitor tanks, known as Deinonychus scouts, to expand the army’s sensor web, so the blinded force might augment its sight. Despite this, indirect fire became paramount, as the big guns of the two monstrous hosts began to fling their ordinance through the smog near-heedlessly. Craters were blasted, tanks were immolated or simply vaporised, but every shell fired by one side was answered in kind by the other. The poison clouds of Smog were illuminated by the artillery, till it seemed as if a thunderstorm raged upon Smog’s surface.

Death howled on the turgid winds, while capital grade weapons exchanged impossibly bright munitions. The Smog burned when the Thunder Lizards and the Titans began to fire. It was only then that the two forces realised just how close they were to one another. The Death Guard and Grendel’s daemon engines took the shallow foothills of the ossified mountain, while the Lion’s forces were just before them, a stone’s throw further down the slope. No more waiting, no more blind-fighting and scanning daemonic smoke for a hint of a foe. So close, the two armoured forces clashed at skirmish range, knife-fighting distance. Battle cannons blared and great chainswords revved, as the freeblades took to the enemy. Melta beams scorched, lance beams carved, missiles corkscrewed into blossoming conflagrations, while blight munitions erupted with black tar that melted even dreadnought skin. Rattling bolter bolts crisscrossed between the closing armies in their millions, rippling detonations bursting like raindrops splashing, but where they burst with water, bolters did with fire and shrapnel.

Dreadnoughts marched uphill against helbrutes and decimators, unleashing flurries of missiles and whirring assault cannon torrents, while the twisted daemons and chaos-cursed space marines returned fire with equally undulled fury. When the rocket launchers and rotary cannons were spent, they clashed in melee, claw, barbed scourge and siege hammer tearing into armour, pulverising the flesh within. Like brawling drunks, they wrestled in the grey mud, artificial voices growling and cursing as they killed and killed and killed.

Defilers crawled about the bodies of struggling warhounds, dragging them down by sheer weight of numbers, while maulerfiends were beheaded and trampled by raging freeblade knight titans, each death heralded by a triumphant blare of their warhorns.

Khimyra had a hundred turrets, and all of them were blaring, firing in all directions. The mad fusion of obliterators and daemons didn’t care which side it killed, for the mechanical spawn was a thing of schizophrenic monstrosity. It stumbled through the Pentum lines, tottering atop pincers and crawler tracks drunkenly. It spun about a pivot which some might call a waist, laying into the foe with reckless abandon. It is said a massive industrial crane, once part of an Ark Mechanicus’ construction yards, sprouted from one side of the gargantuan abomination, and upon it dangled a mighty flail, the heavy of which was a dead land raider, fused with the chain. As it spun, the flail swept whole battalions to ruin, and flipped tanks onto their sides, and even breaking the armoured knee joint of a warlord titan, just as it lined its volcano cannon up for a kill shot. The titan instead toppled backwards down the hill, crushing lord-knows how many of its allies in its wake.

The Lion and his coterie of tanks charged up the hill like an armoured spear tip, crashing against the fetid space marines bloated by nurgle’s curse. Lionsteed, his personal land raider, didn’t even slow down as it smashed Death Guard aside bodily, or else crushed them beneath its tracks like burst pus-filled blisters. Lascnanons and assault cannons filled the air with whickering fire, sending many APCs and predators to an early grave, but more still pressed on past the burning hulks, inexorably pushing towards the looming Bone citadel, wreathed in the thickest banks of smog on the world.

Meanwhile, the Tyrannosaurus Rex, mightiest of the Thunder Lizards, led the charge up the hill, void shields scorching any who barred its path to ash, and blazing away with its lance turret every few minutes. Lesser tanks were vaporized by the Thunder Lizards, and some were even driven over by them, predators and whirlwinds pressed flat by the Russ-width tracks of the superheavies. Plaguereapers, haunted tanks of nurgle that might once have been called baneblades, descended besides corrupted fellblades to meet the Thunder Lizards, and at such closing distances, both sides began to lose units. While the Thunder Lizards could weather the cannons of the nurgle tanks, Mortarion’s armour was too close for the Thunder Lizard main guns to engage them effectively. Some of the plaguereapers got around this by ramming the Allosaurs and Tyrannosaurs directly, punching through the voids and shattering against the armoured prows of the superior tanks. The odious remains of the tanks, however, soon dissolved their killers, mission-killing them in turn. Only the Rex was too large and powerful to impede, and when a plaguereaper attempted to ram it, the Tank Commander deployed great piston rams at the prow to flip the foe, end over end, to land on its roof, crushing its turret flat and taking the reaper out of action. Rex approached the citadel, and even managed to line up a perfect shot with its lance turret. But that was when Grendel lunged out of the smog, and leapt upon the Tyrannosaurus Rex, instantly catching fire as it slammed into, and then through, its void shields. The titan-defiler’s claws closed about the lance turret, and with a horrific howl and shriek of sundered metal, it tore the turret’s barrel from its mounting, and cast it back down the mountainside.

The Tyranosaurus was not done however. Even as the defiler-titan tore chunks from its hull, its secondary turrets and missile pods plunged point blank weapons fire into the belly of Grendel, burning it from the inside with coruscating fire. In a last ditch attempt to free themselves of Grendel, Rex engaged its landing thrusters, and began to ascend with Grendel upon its back. The tank rose high, right to the edge of the smog layers before Grendel finally lost its grip. The sight of a titan tumbling from thirty thousand feet is staggering. There are over fifty works based upon the scene of Grendel’s smoting, as it crashed into the mountainside, and exploded in a storm of freed souls, that howled as the nova-burst fire of his destruction then engulfed them all over again.

Alas though, the Rex, having expended its emergency reserves, also tumbled back to Smog, reaching terminal velocity just as it plunged into the ranks of the daemon engines, and detonated with a far-less haunted, but no less lethal, blossom of nuclear fire. (Note: The honour rolls of the Thunder Lizards lists the crew of the Rex highest amongst their regiment, and forever after, the command tank of a Thunder Lizard regiment was always referred to as ‘the Rex’ in memorial, regardless of the actual model of tank deployed.)

The Lion’s predators and supporting supply tanks began to fall behind as the primarch pierced the noisome veil between them and the citadel. The Smog was thick here, and began to dissolve even the thick adamantium and ceramite of their hulls. Soon, they had to turn back, leaving only the land raiders and their terminator cargo to push on to the palace of the Smog Queen.

The Lion was the first from his land raider as they reached the gates. Bedecked in his black armour, trimmed with deep green trim and his mighty winged helm, he laid into the assembled plague marines with the Lion Sword singing in his hand, a unique pistol of roaring volkite destruction in the other. He fought with a skill even his brothers would struggle to match, swift as a striking asp, yet with the clean, workmanlike precision of a swordsman almost without peer. The plague marines assailed him, but could not withstand him, even their formidable constitutions struggled to endure decapitations and flurries of bisecting blows. When Tsulganor and the other assault terminators caught up, they finished the job, and breached the great gates of corroded, daemonic bronze.

But this was but the vanguard of the horrors that were soon to assail the Dark Lion of Pentum. The Kai Bane were deadly, with their daemonic kai guns and bronze pincers that could pierce even tactical dreadnought plate with ease. In the close, stagnant confines of the palace, space marines and daemon engines died screaming, dragging each other to oblivion in the swirling, confusing melee. The maze of corridors would have been an impediment to most forces, but Tsulganor’s hammer, a gift of Vulkan, smashed through the walls like rotting paper, punching a path through the nest of ugly nurglitch things that sought to encircle them. Further plague marines appeared, and with them veritable tides of the undead, pressed back into unnatural life by the smog, which infested and animated them. Dozens were cut down by the flashing blades of the Lion’s retinue, but dozens more pressed against them in their wake, and those that died continued to crawl mindlessly. Only the cleansing fire of flamers, and the Lion’s volkite weapon permanently put down the rotting masses. 

When the Lion finally smashed the hinges from the inner sanctum of the bone palace, only five terminators, armour corroded and rusting in cancerous patches, stood with him. Almost instantly, they were assailed by a new foe; whip thin monsters, crude mockeries of the eldar they once were, with smog billowing from the joints in their organic armour. Despite the putrefaction of their bodies, they were whip-quick and lethal with their poisoned blades and ancient eldar weaponry. Having slain the others, Tsulganor found himself holding off the corrupted eldar with his flaming thunder hammer, as the Lion pressed on towards the Queen herself.

She was swollen with power, writhing with the souls of countless eldar reborn in her belly. Skeletal wings spread from her shoulders, and darkened the hall where they passed. Her eyes still wept with tar, but they wept with joy, her translucent lips glistening as she smiled. Her decayed form was rebuilding itself, re-knitting and regenerating before the Lion’s eyes. To her left, a great fireplace roared with sickly green flames. To her right, chained by his wrists to the wall dangled Fulgrim. He had regained his humanoid form, but looked no less wretched for this fact. Stripped of his armour, he was a muscular Adonis, though compared to the perfection of his form before the Heresy, he was a gaunt shade, miserable and hollow. He could only scowl hopelessly as he saw his lost betrayed brother return.

“Free me Lion. Free me. You cannot kill him... free me...” Fulgrim demanded, though his voice had lost all of its arrogant conviction. The Lion strode past him, heedless.

“Welcome, weary traveller. Come, rest by our hearth fire. The fight is over. Come, surrender to death with me. Embracing your fate will ease its passage,” she said, her voice a whisper, louder than any mortal shriek. The soporific scent of her smog was warp-tainted and fought to bypass the Lion’s mighty winged helm, to drag him into the despairing morass that clung to her ethereal bones. But Jonson was not one to fall for traitors’ tricks or vile sorceries. 

The Lion calmly approached warily, his sword raised in a high guard position, like a knight from a fighter’s manual. His deep emerald cloak swept behind him, and his armoured boots rang against the cold stone below. 

Two Death Guard in ancient, pale terminator armour stepped from the shadows and stood either side of the Lion, guarding the two secondary entrances into the chamber. The Deathshroud made no move to attack the Lion, or communicate in any way. Their manreapers were held across their chests as if in anticipation. The mere fact of their existence told the Lion just who the Queen’s champion was.

Mortarion appeared as a condensing mass of smoke and bile, which slowly contorted and formed a solid entity, like an image of a rotting corpse in reverse. Vast and hooded, wreathed in the raw stuff of the warp, the Death guard primarch had long ago transcended the mortal limitations of his primarch body. His scythe was larger than the Lion was tall, and his very presence seemed to make the room shrink, as if cowering from his very being. Impossible winds billowed about him as the Reaper peered down at his former brother.

“I knew this day would come, eventually. I had not expected to meet you so soon though brother.”

“Do not call me brother. The day you spat upon your oaths was the day my brother died.”

Mortarion laughed bitterly, his breath a wheezing gale from his hidden face. “Ever since Barbarus, I told him I had no time for tyrants. Typical of the Emperor to not even consider he was the tyrant, unworthy of our adoration.”

The Lion jabbed his sword forwards, roaring in fury. “It doesn’t matter what he is! You accepted his legions, and fought his wars! You swore fealty to him, and to the Imperium of Man. The one Imperium of Man.”

Mortarion blocked the sudden rush of blows directed towards him, his scythe darting with effortless speed to intercept every blow. He continued to speak, in mocking sadness, as he duelled.

“I fight against tyrants. For a civilisation, no matter how monolithic and cruel, cannot last forever. Everything rots, just as every system eventually falls. Nurgle remade me so that I could do so until the end of time. I am entropy and the rust that breaks the chains of the slavers who serve order, security and ‘peace’.”

The Lion’s blows came faster and faster, as he pressed Mortarion back, across the octagonal throne room. He fought with grim intensity, while Mortarion fought with the irresistible inevitability of an avalanche. As they fought, Tsulganor wrestled with the eldar, crushing those he couldn’t burn with his flamers.

Fulgrim watched with building desperation. He strained in his chains, drawing on all his remaining might. The laer sword stood, taunting him, daring him to come and claim it, to prove he was worthy once more. Slannesh, that frigid bitch, had abandoned him here, driven him into a lazy fugue for a thousand years, and let him kill his own men just to please her. But she was not here, he wouldn’t help Fulgrim. He turned to his own reserves of might, those powers innate to a primarch. He screamed as the manacles began to bite, and the chains began to cut.

The Lion taunted Mortarion as he cut at the malleable grey flesh of his former brother. “And yet you serve that golden-skinned lunatic. How many has he chained? Angron, mad dog he is, has a new collar I hear, and the daemons have their leashes now. If the Emperor was such a slaver, what does that make the Travesty?”

The Lion lunged, spearing his sword for the daemon primarch’s heart, but he sidestepped, and swept he scythe perilously close to the Lion’s head.

“The Travesty? It is transitory. It is already dying, just as every empire crumbles. The Imperium is dead, the Imperium Secundus died, the Eldar empires, and the realms of the First Kind before them. Pentum dies too, soon. All of it is going to be undone, and we’re going to be riding the world ride as it plunges into fiery oblivion!” Mortarion roared, his scythe hacking through pillars and statues as he rained down countless smoking black arcs against the eternal Knight. The Lion staggered backwards, barely fending off blow upon blow upon blow. Finally, the Lion was flung upon his back as he deflected a fearsome backhanded blow from the great Reaper. “Every primarch will die before this is done. Every last one! We all die!”

The Lion rolled to avoid a descending blow, and brought his sword up in time to slice deep into Mortarion’s flank.

“So be it. We all die,” he growled, dragging the blade free in a tide of venomous oil. “But you’ll die first.”

Mortarion swirled around, and punched the Lion with a fist as large as a contemptor’s claw. The primarch was pitched backwards, hurled bodily into the fireplace. The Lion roared in anger and confusion as his cloak and his armor was engulfed in the tainted green fire. He rolled to try and put the flames out, but they were malicious and hungry. In his desperation, he dropped the Lion sword. Before he could retrieve it, Mortarion grabbed his ankle, and flung him into the air, before slamming him down into the floor again, splitting stone and carving a man-shaped crater into the polluted tiles. The Lion’s blow still bled freely from Mortarion’s side, nurglings giggling and cavorting in the black puddle pooling around them.

The Lion drew his volkite pistol and emptied the power-mag into Mortarion’s face. The daemon recoiled, braying like a titan as the plasma fire ate into his blasphemous form. The Lion cast aside his spent pistol, and leapt to retrieve his sword. It was then that the two Deathshrouds waded into combat, slashing at the unarmed knight with their daemon weapons. He fought them off with defensive forearm blocks, before he punched a hole in the chest of the first and caved in the head of the second. Still, the two space marines came at him, chopping into his black armor with methodical blows. He was forced to rip them limb from limb, beating them into green and red ruins with their own dismembered arms.

The Lion almost reached his sword, before Mortarion recovered and swept his scythe into him. The Lion pivoted to avoid the scythe, but was just a little too slow. The blade bit deep, and passed through the artificer armor with diabolic ease. The Lion screamed in horror more than agony, as his left hand tumbled away from him. Before it even hit the floor, unnatural sorceries rotted the hand to bone inside its gauntlet. The Lion retreated from the Reaper’s next blow, only just managing to snatch up his sword before the scythe took anything more precious to him.

Now the Lion was worried. He circled around Mortarion, lion sword raised and pointed at the Reaper’s chest, warding him away with hasty jabs.

“Death by a thousand cuts is it? Inevitably, you will lose such a contest, for you are still, in the end, mortal. Cut me a million times, and I will survive to cut you a million and one times. Everything you lose, I will gain. You will weaken, and I will not. This is how the Lion loses its pride, and dies like all the others. I am beyond you brother.”

Mortarion lunged forwards, his scythe raised. The Lion sprang forwards, and chopped low then high, cutting through knees and opening up Mortarion’s belly. Serpentine intestines billowed out from the wound, slithering and trying to strangle the Lion, even as he cut through them like a jungle explorer cuts vines. Mortarion chuckled darkly, elbowing his brother in the helmet. The knight stumbled, reeling drunkenly from the daemonic force of the blow. Shaking his head, he backed away, clutching the stump of his left wrist under his armpit.

Mortarion simply turned to face him, ignoring the wounds that drooled and bubbled with his evil juices. “Don’t fight this. I cannot be withstood. You know this. You have always known this. I am Death, and death cannot die, not until all other things have perished.”

Mortarion looked as if he might say something else, but before he could, promethium flame engulfed him, head to foot. Tsulganor stepped forwards, his wrist flamers dumping their entire fuel reserves into the daemon thing.

Aflame and screaming, Mortarion clashed with the Lion with renewed vigour, forcing the knight to go on the defensive, using all the skill he could muster while fighting one-handed.

The Queen of Smog watched, entranced. Drunken with stolen power, her senses were dulled, her own intoxicating miasma blinding her to all but the duel fought by her champion. The daemon queen was powerful, glutted with terrible reserves of warp energy, but she was not immune to being surprised. And she was certainly surprised when Fulgrim broke free of his bonds, and leapt upon her, winding his runic chains around her great neck. The warded chains clashed with her daemonic aura like molten steel plunged into ice water. She howled and roared, segmented tail thrashing as her talons clawed at Fulgrim’s face. But the chains separated her from the great wellspring of her powers, so she could only use her physical form to resist the primarch. Fulgrim held onto the thrashing monarch with all his might, hissing and panting with exertion, desperately throttling her with the chain, which glowed and steamed as it burned her.

“You should have stolen it all and killed me. Trust an eldar to play with its food!” he snarled, biting into her ear. The acidic ichors burned his throat and stained his chin, but he didn’t care. The two creatures wrestled and fought for supremacy, claws and teeth tearing chunks from one another, while the Queen choked and Fulgrim bled.

Tsulganor charged Mortarion, his hammer rose, but was swatted away almost as an afterthought. His armoured cracked, and the Salamander’s hammer was sent skittering across the pulverized flagstones.

The Lion fought fiercely, and cut Mortarion again and again. But, true to his word, the Death Guard simply would not die. Organs and body parts tumbled away, rotting to grease in seconds, only for more putrid appendages and vital fluids to fill the voids and re-grow his rotted form.

Each time the Lion blocked the Reaper’s scythe, it grew a little harder to resist, each time the scythe was stronger, the Lion weaker. But as they fought, they both noted how the toxic gas filling the chamber seemed to be receding, the Smog clearing.

Both combatants spared a glance to the throne. Fulgrim straddled the Queen of Smog, throttling her with his former slave chains in one hand, his other clutching the laer sword, which erupted from her chest. Already, the daemon’s form was dissolving back into the immaterium. Her bid for ascension was thwarted. Fulgrim stepped down from the throne, as the Queen vanished in a cloud of burning embers, leaving the naked form of Fulgrim alone, his sword drawn.

The Lion seized on this moment of distraction, and thrust the Lion sword into Mortarion, up to the hilt. The tip erupted from his chest in a spray of bubbling acid. Mortarion twisted on the spot, flinging the Lion and his sword away dismissively, but in the process opening up his chest. His chest wound split apart like a red smile, revealing his odious, pulsating organs within. But still, he could not be undone.

Fulgrim charged now, screaming as he swung the Laer sword. Mortarion swatted the blade aside, before sweeping back to behead Fulgrim, who deftly avoided such a fate. He was cackling like a mad man now, passing his sword between his hands eagerly.

“Brother? Dear brother!” Fulgirm called out to the Lion. “It seems I am to be the hero today. Shall we face our foe together? Three hands are better than two after all. Well, four hands would be even better, but i shan’t hold that against you,” Fulgrim laughed, as he darted aside Mortarion’s increasingly irritated scythe sweeps.

The Lion didn’t reply, but responded instead by charging at their mutual foe, his sword raised. They both circled Mortarion like hunting wolves cornering a deer that no longer wanted to run. Their blades were swift as lightning strikes, striking wherever Mortarion’s scythe was not. Even a daemon prince couldn’t fend off two primarchs without showing its back to one of them, and so Mortarion distained blocking their blows. Let them cut him, he thought, for they cannot harm him. Even then, the two primarchs were tiring, the toxins and injuries they had suffered weighing them down, even as Mortarion fed upon the damage inflicted upon him. Fulgrim ducked his blade and plunged the curved laer blade inside the opened ribcage of his brother. He saw something there, and made to call out to Lion, but the Reaper’s fist slammed into his pretty face, sending him sprawling. Before Mortarion could finish Fulgrim, the Lion hacked off the Lord of Death’s arm, sending the hideous limb spiraling away in a tide of blood. From the stump, tentacles sprouted and lashed at the knight primarch hungrily.

“Damn you, why can’t you die?” the Lion cursed aloud as he hewed the writhing daemon limbs.

“His heart! The name! He cannot endure that!” Fulgrim slurred. The scythe slashed across his bicep as he tried to sidestep the daemon’s vicious follow up strike. Fulgrim nevertheless sprang forwards, stabbing through Mortarion’s remaining arm, as the Lion jumped onto the broad shoulders of the towering pillar of corruption. The Lion was thrown off, but not before slitting Mortarion’s blubbery throat. While the daemon prince gagged on his own putrid juices, Fulgrim tackled him bodily. His arm disappeared into Mortarion’s chest, up to the elbow. Mortarion’s severed arm had grown back, and with it he plucked Fulgrim up, and flung him away with a piercing roar. Fulgrim struck the Smog Queen’s throne, smashing it into powder as he landed. But Fulgrim smiled wickedly as he rose again. For in his hand pulsed a great black heart, pulsing with green veins. And upon that heart was etched the one thing that could bind the Lord of Death. His true name.

Mortarion was no more his real name than Aurellian, Lupercal or the Phoenician was the true name of those primarchs. Mortarion was the name of death, but it was a title all the same. But the name, carved there in ancient times by a long-dead nemesis, bore the daemon primarch’s true name. And Fulgrim spoke it aloud. The resultant blast destroyed the heart utterly, and threw Fulgrim to the ground, a smoldering ruin. But the effect upon Mortarion was worse. 

Suddenly, his powers were bound, his form fixed. An anchor point, a place in history where Mortarion could be killed. He screamed, his scream undulating and filled with existential agony. He clawed at the gushing wound in his chest, desperately pawing for his vanquished heart. All of a sudden, the Lord of death was all too mortal.

That was when the Lion stepped in front of him, and took off his head with a single backhanded swipe.

“This ends every traitor.”

Outside, the smog was fading, recoiling as its patron daemon was vanquished. This opened the skies to the ordnance waiting in orbit. The Nemenmarines were all too eager to unleash their pinpoint lance strikes on the chaotic ground forces below. Such large targets were easy prey for the waiting fleet, and Mortarion’s forces were soon decimated. The survivors fled to what few space capable vessels they had left. The remnants of the plague fleet fought through the Lion fleet’s blockades, and fled back to the warp.

The palace of bone would be next. The Pentus forces only needed word that the Lion was clear before they could begin their macrocannon onslaught, and end the threat of Smog forever.

Inside, the Lion stood before Fulgrim. Both were wary, both had their swords drawn.

“Are you going to slay me now Lion? I thought you had honor. Such honor, that you cling to it like a shield to shelter behind. I saved you, I aided your Imperium Pentus. Will you let me leave?”

“No. You are a traitor. Once long ago, I thought I could make peace with traitors, but I am older now, and I know that traitors can suffer only one fate.”

Fulgrim spat at the Lion’s feet. “Capture me then, take me to the others. Let them judge me.”

The Lion shook his head, his sword still pointed at Fulgrim. “I do not spare traitors. You were useful to me, but your prowess does not wash away your manifest crimes. Your treason and sedition. They must be punished.”

“Treason? You speak to me of treason? Then what of you, with your Imperium Secundus? You and Roboute with your sneaky little plans.”

“Enough! The Imperium Secundus was a continuation of the Imperium of Man, I was always loyal to the Imperium of Man and the one true ruler of our race!”

Fulgrim paced around the Lion, passing his sword between his hands carefully. He was without armor and drained of much of his essence, and the Lion was without a hand, and he had discarded his ruined helmet. He couldn’t tell how a duel at this moment would end, and this unnerved the usually arrogant duelist.

“And what now? Vulkan’s little enterprise isn’t a continuation of the Imperium is it? I have seen the Smith’s great new civilization with its freedoms and its religions. The Emperor is dead, and now the Primarchs rule as they please. I am a traitor, yes, but no more than you,” Fulgrim hissed, expecting the last barb to send the Lion into a rage. Instead, he was quiet. Oddly quiet.

Fulgrim frowned. “You didn’t argue with me. You... wait...” Fulgrim paused, his eyes wide. Then he grinned. “You agree with me. You agree that the Imperium Pentum is a den of traitors too! Oh this is too good!”

Fulgrim raised his arms, beckoning the Lion. “You’ve finally seen the galaxy for what it is. Without the Emperor, what is loyalty? Come, my brother in treachery, come and embrace one of your own.

The Lion stepped forwards, and plunged the Lion sword through Fulgrim’s unprotected chest. Fulgrim blinked in surprise, their faces inches from one another. The Lion ripped the sword upwards, then across, cutting through all the vital organs of the primarch. Fulgrim’s mouth trickled with gore.

“You don’t know me, brother. You never have. The Emperor’s ideals are not dead! Loyalty is everything. Loyalty is worthless if one is only loyal when it suits them to be, when it is convenient. Just because the Emperor is gone, does not give my brothers the right to forsake their vows, their oaths and forsake their Father’s decrees. Not you, not Mortarion, not Vulkan or Russ or Corax. They are useful to me, as you were, but their destruction of the Travesty does not expunge their guilt. And they are guilty, every one. They ignore the teachings of the Emperor, they consort with xenos and spread permissiveness and spare our enemies! Only I keep the faith, me! I am the last loyal son!”

With that, the Lion ripped the sword free, before finally slashing open Fulgrim’s throat.

Drenched in blood, the Lion turned around slowly, and met the horrified gaze of Tsulganor, who had retrieved his hammer. The Lion stepped towards him, and the marine flinched back, raising his hammer warily. The Lion’s expression remained fixed and grim.

“How much did you...?”

“Enough,” growled Tsulganor, his voice quivering with fear and wrath in equal measure.

“Think about what you do next very carefully.”

“I have to inform my Lord father of this treachery. You know this.”

“I am not a traitor. When the others are gone, when the Imperium is returned to what it once was, you’ll understand.”

Tsulganor gripped his hammer tightly, and fixed the Lion with a tearful scowl, his red eyes smouldering. “I don’t think you know me at all either, my Lord.”

###

The siege of Smog ended with a firestorm, once the Lion and the rest of the armour elements left on the surface were retrieved. Cyclonic torpedoes turned the surface to a rolling maelstrom of molten rock and scourging volcanic surges.

Tsulganor, killed by Mortarion during the initial storming of the palace, was afforded the highest posthumous honours possible within the Imperium Pentum.

The Lion’s fleet left the world to burn, and he set out to rejoin the Pentum fleets in their war of annihilation against all those who were heretics and accursed. Little could any of them realize the roiling tides of anger beneath the Lion’s cold, unreadable features.
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